A library community in Ning

If you've not been near Ning for a while, you'll find it has a new skin. On the surface, it's now a dead easy to build and use community website. And it's free.

(It used to be a mashup-building site for propellor heads. The techie stuff is still there, but you don't need to go near it.)

Jenny Levine, through her blog The Shifted Librarian, has been showing librarians how they can extend their services beyond the conventional boundaries of place and time. She doesn't just talk the talk, she walks the walk as well. She is authoritative on both library and technology matters. And now she's leap-frogged the usual internal processes to create an experimental community presence for the American Library Association.

If you include me, 97 people have signed up already. And it was only launched three days ago. Members can include their profiles and photos, write blog posts, contribute to forums, link up to each other and, of course, have conversations. Although targeted at members of the ALA, anyone can join and see what's going on.

The Ning sites score because they are focused. This one is for librarians and for those interested in the subject.

Here's what Ning has to say about itself:

Ning is the only online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network for free in seconds.

You can make it public or private and for anything - and anyone - you'd like.

Why not see if there are any groups centred around your interests and, if not, create one?

One warning: if you make it private, you can't provide public RSS feeds. You have to make do with email notifications of new postings. Fortunately, the ALA's Ning site is public so you can take feeds from various places, including the blog and the forum, and see what's going on without even signing up.

The Green Book Webinar is next step in developing e-learning for LexisNexis

LexisNexis, one of the leading legal and financial information providers, have announced the launch of their first webinar in mid-April. Intended for their legal professional clients, it will coincide with the launch of the 2007 edition of The Civil Court Practice or as it’s also known, the “Green Book”. The broadcast will feature a pre-recorded presentation on recent developments from the Rt Hon The Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury who is Editor in Chief, before the main three live lectures are shown. These will be panelled by Green Book senior contributing editor David Di Mambo as well as editorial board members David Greene and Master Leslie.

LexisNexis emerging products specialist, Ann Hemming said “e-learning has raised some interesting questions over how to provide additional value to our customers. LexisNexis believes that providing live and recorded webinars will offer our customers opportunities to interact with our editors and authors and gain CPD points in a convenient and cost effective manner”.

Viewers will be able to question the panel either during the live session or by submitting questions prior to the broadcast, furthermore LexisNexis inform us there will be the opportunity for users to gain two CPD points (a total of 16 is needed per year for certain legal professionals in England and Wales) if they stick around after the show and finish a series of multiple choice questions online.

Hemming joined LexisNexis in December last year with the remit of developing an e-learning strategy for the organisation also said, “Webinars are easy to access and will prove popular with legal professionals who will benefit greatly from the insight offered by our high profile speakers.”

Government accused of neglecting nanosafety research, whilst applications for funding remain low

As part of a review of commitments made to bolster nanotechnology in 2005, the Council for Science and Technology (CST) has said that the UK government has failed to provide adequate funding for research into the possible risks of nanotech as well as jeopardising the UK’s position as world leaders in the field, bbc.co.uk reported today.

The original report was commissioned by the government from the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering and was published in 2004; it highlighted the opportunities for nanotech as well as risks of the developing technology.

It was revealed that of £90 million spent on research and the promotion of commercial nanoproducts, in 2004 alone, only £600,000 was spent on researching the impact of nanoscience over a five year period.

The new review did get some recognition for making inroads in researching the measuring and minimising of workplace exposure to nanomaterials as opposed to the wider areas of environmental and health implications. However comments made by Professor Sir John Beringer, Chair of the CST review were critical “The government made a very clear commitment that research needed to be done to understand more about the toxicology and possible risks that may arise from some of the nanotechnologies, but there has been virtually nothing done by government to resolve this problem.”

Part of the problem seems that funding for this particular sector of nanotechnology has not been applied for by researchers, Malcolm Wicks, Minister for Science and Innovation believes this is in part due to the prioritising of “more pressing research” he said “Our focus so far has been on the areas which needed to be addressed first, such as the measurement and characterisation of nanoscale materials, and the exposure of laboratory and manufacturing staff,” One would think this was pretty reasonable when researching a radical new technology, however he went on to say, “Research is underway into potential health and environmental hazards but we are disappointed that few researchers wishing to investigate the implications to human health have applied for the funding that is available.”

Meanwhile the BBC article reported the CST review is critical of the strategy used by government in allocating funds, saying that, “rather than outlining a systematic research programme to examine these potential risks, the government has relied on a reactive and ad hoc funding programme that has failed to deliver”. Sir John commented further saying “The safe development of a new technology should not depend on whether an academic wins a highly competitive research grant”.   

Free up access to archives for all

As the Blair administration prepares to leave the stage, one has to wonder why a decade of centre-left government in the UK has failed to foster a new information era. OK, some measures, long overdue, were delivered – like the Freedom of Information Act – and then scaled back on cost grounds. Hardly a sign of principled advancement.

Mostly it has been a case of the dog that didn't bark. No leadership on making publicly funded research freely available – and damn the shareholders of all the publishing houses who are making money from it. Nor any leadership on supporting homegrown British information industries. Just wasted years.

One can hope that the next government will act, and act decisively, to support the freeing up of information locked away in government bodies, which the people of the country actually own. No more privitisation of intelligence resources, should be the cry. Let all have access, freely, and let people create businesses and livelihoods around doing creative things with that information.

Google recently demonstrated how demand for information soars exponentially through freer access. It digitised over 100 films from the US National Archives – including a selection from the NASA History of Space Flight (1962-1981), United Newsreel reports from the World War 2, and Department of the Interior films from 1916 to 1970, showing a range of public service projects. These are available on Google Video.

James Hastings, director of access programmes at the National Archives, has told the New York Times that once these had been made available, requests jumped from 200 per annum to over 200,000 a year. A thousand fold.

Archives that make themselves available online will establish themselves in the lead. Think Google Book Project; or think Time magazine's excellent free cover and content archive (which is also a great marketing tool for an iconic magazine with global appeal).

Will the entrenched fat cats of the information industry continue to enjoy the supine support of government once Blair has gone? I, for one, hope not.

Grazr gives you power without responsibility

Grazr is an attractive little viewer for XML and OPML information. Until recently, you needed to find yourself a host machine on which to store the files to be viewed. This was usually okay for the technically-minded because they generally knew where to find such storage (the company server, an ISP server or their blogging platform) and how to upload the files. It was nigh on impossible for anyone else.

Well, a whole bunch of things have happened in the Grazr world recently, the best of which is free hosting for your files and the most astonishingly easy way to create a browser reader for them. This morning David Terrar, a software as a service supplier (but not a techie), blogs about how he got going with Grazr in just a few minutes.

So, providing you have web access, you can provide reading lists or information feed lists more or less at the drop of a hat and without involvement of technical staff or consuming computer resources.

From a standing start last June, Grazr has made some amazing progress. Earlier this month it received $1.5M in series A funding and welcomed Dan Bricklin (programmer of the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc) onto the board. It also developed a simple scripting language with which you can embed extra elements, such as searches, right inside Grazr and now it has incorporated the JavaScript programming language. These last two developments are in the public beta release. Here's a simple example which searches Google blogs:

German media giant has its eye on Thomson Learning

One of Germany's largest media companies, Bertelsmann is considering the acquisition of Thomson Learning, which the Thomson corporation put up for sale late last year because it feels the academic electronic content and text book publisher does not fit with its strategy.

Bertelsmann has entered into an agreement with Citigroup Private Equity and Morgan Stanley Principal Investments to form a fund of £2.5bn which will allow Bertelsmann to take a minority share in information companies with a view to an outright acquisition at a later date.

According to the Financial Times Thomson Learning is the first acquisition the new team has in mind. Bertelsmann already owns RTL Television, which Channel 5 is part of and the publishing company Random House. The media giant will add 500m Euros to the fund with the rest being supplied by the funding companies.

Blog awards miss the point

Tomorrow is the closing date for the 2007 Brit Blog Awards. No industry can exist these days without an award ceremony it seems. Sadly these awards, sponsored by web search provider Ask and organised by one of London's free newspapers has failed to recognise that blogging has taken off and offers a whole array of communities the chance to communicate.

There are categories for technology, sport, fashion, politics, arts & entertainment; travel, youth and weird and wonderful.

Perhaps because the organisers, the Metro newspaper and its parent the derisive Daily Mail have a poor track record at good news reporting there is no category for news, nor is there a category for business blogs, science and culture. Any one who has picked up either of these papers will be aware of their inabilities in these areas; and therefore it is perhaps sensible that they don't try to judge quality bloggers in these areas.

But the truth is, blogging has become a serious platform for creating, sharing and delivering information and if it is to have an awards ceremony, it needs one that has credibility.

German research community license British information

Germany's Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the national funding body for scientific, technical and academic research has struck a licensing deal with British engineering and management academic publishers Emerald Group Publishing.

All registered students of higher education, faculty and research based government employees will now be given access to all Emerald journals online. The deal, negotiated by the Universitäts-und Stadtbibliothek Köln (USB)and Informationszentrum Sozialwissenschaften (IZ) provides access to content published between January 1994 and December 2005. 

Under the terms of the agreement 339 universities in Germany will gain access to Emerald titles, which include popular academic journals Management Decision, the European Journal of Marketing and engineering  title Soldering & Surface Mount Technology.

Re-Imagining the library

Last week saw an Talis/CILIP-sponsored event called 'Re-imagining the library'. The speakers ranged across a number of topics, but all were trying to lift the thoughts of the delegates out of the library and towards the new audiences that are out there.
My small contribution boiled down to understanding the new expectations of an internet-connected, socially-connected, instant-gratification-oriented crowd and knowing the skills and value that librarians can deliver. The punchline was "get the library to visit its users." Through their computer screens, of course.
The high spot for most was Antony Brewerton's session on branding. He brought to life his methods for garnering attention and 'business' for his academic libraries (Reading, Oxford Brookes and Warwick universities, in that sequence). His approach to branding was very unstuffy and resonated well with the undergraduates.
He was not afraid to be playful and he made great use of good images. Jammy dodger biscuits with a heart-shaped cutout formed the basis for a survey, "What do you love about the library?" The same biscuit broken with, "What breaks your heard about the library?" 'love' and 'heart' were the biggest words.
Later, he chose pictures of 45rpm singles to make points about noise in libraries. Song titles did the hard work: "Silence is golden", "Happy talk" and "Hanging on the telephone", for example. Oh yes, and "Dead ringer for love." He did cake-oriented promotions with slogans like, "Crumbs ... who'd have thought the library had as much on offer?" My favourite was Newton's apple (lovingly prepared by Antony) captioned, "inspiration" and "available now from the library."
His point was "Promote resources, services and benefits" rather than the library itself.
Given the mainly poor image of the public library in the UK, I came away wondering whether he shouldn't be put in charge of a national campaign to boost the public's understanding of its library services.

Getting Live Search into companies the leveraged way

Searchblog has been passed a very interesting looking Powerpoint presentation that suggests that Microsoft is leveraging its installed software base to get companies to buy into its search service. The presentation claims that signing on with this will provide the customer with $2-$10 worth of credit per computer annually.

As a comment on John Batelle's blog points out, paying companies to take your search service is a bad sign. Live.com has some very interesting elements to it, and a lot of potential. It's a bit of a shame that certain widgets on the Live site - such as the one that displays Hotmail email - seem to be broken, mind. It's kept us going back to Hotmail.com to pick up our daily allotment of spam.

To a certain extent, the dominance of Internet Explorer has meant that MSN Search has had a slight edge anyway, but it should also be pointed out that Microsoft is suggesting customers push IE7 and Live Search as the platform of choice to their employees. All's fair in love and business, but this does hark back to the sort of tactics that Microsoft has been famous for in the past. It'll be interesting to see how Google and Yahoo respond to this.

Lowering the bar to Access Management

Back when IWR's staff were tuning in and dropping out at Uni, JANET was a pretty new thing, and the National Centre for Super Computing Applications had developed a program called Mosaic that looked pretty interesting. Things have got a lot more complicated than they were in those early days, and allowing staff and students access to resources is a more complicated business.
Enter, stage left, Eduserv, the not-for-profit public sector services organisation. Eduserv has launched OpenAthens, a cheaper and easier framework for instititions that want to get access to UK Access Management Federation resources protected by internet2's Shibboleth, and keep access to Athens-protected resources. The aim, effectively, is to enable institutions to share and secure resources easily. At the moment, OpenAthens is not a huge deal - after all, JISC has made it possible for institutions to get free access to information protected by Athens and Shibboleth until July 2008. But after that point, it's a paid for game, and OpenAthens provides access for between £1000 and £10,000 per institution. The deal here is economies of scale - Eduserv does the development and offers it to many.
Eduserv reckons the bill is cheaper than Universities and the like going out and developing their own framework from scratch, but of course there are a couple of other options out there. The main two are Microsoft's  CardSpace, built on .Net (read a quick summary here) and the OpenID, which is a bit more, well, open, than Microsoft's offering. But the interesting thing about OpenAthens is that it's pretty much Switzerland - it'll play happily with OpenID and Shibboleth, yet be cheaper to implement than doing it in house using .Net framework or OpenID.

Microsoft goes for unified communications

Along with the paperless office, the idea of Unified
Communications has always been one of those lovely concepts that has stayed
just that - a concept. Apart from the companies trying to sell it, this has
been a blessed relief to the rest of us. Now that's likely
to change, and it's also going to change desktop search.

If you’ve not heard of Unified Comms, or if the memory of it is so traumatic
your mind has blanked it out, it’s basically the idea of getting all of your
communications - voicemail, email, calendaring and the rest - on one device, be
it a PC, land line phone or mobile. Each vendor wanted you to use it’s platform
- be it a mobile (Nokia), landline (Lucent) or monolithic, paleolithic groupware (Lotus
Notes).

The big change over the past few years has been Microsoft’s increasing interest
in using Internet Protocol for voice communications. IP telephony is hardly
new, but it has now reached a point where it is becoming a mainstream product, something that organisations buy almost as a matter of course when choosing a phone system for a new office or building. Add to that increasing amounts of cheap storage that can be accessed easily, and UC is looking less horrible than it did before.

This adds a lot more information to office systems. Where voice mail, for example, was stored away in the phone system, managed by users themselves and rarely retained for more than a few hours after listening, now it can be as straightforward to manage - in theory - as email. There is, of course, one slight fly in the ointment. While machines are good at reading and classifying text, the spoken word is a little different. On top of that, Unified Communications is still the equivalent of wearing socks and sandals.

Let's see if Jeff Raikes' prediction at Voicecon of 100m desktop VoIP users in three years actually bears out. As Gartner analyst Steve Blood points out, there are currently 100m Exchange users, so Microsoft is going to have its work cut out. One last thing; it appears that Microsoft has fallen into the trap of every vendor that has tried to go for unified messaging vendor - tying the messaging to their 'home' platform -  in this case, the desktop OS and productivity suite.

Disinformation superhighway

If you travel on trains a fair amount, then you may well have noticed some smart black, white and red ads for www.information-revolution.org, asking us all some interesting questions about whether we should trust our information sources. Very good questions to ask, we think you'll agree.

The site looks very slick, with nice, homely touches like scanned bits
of paper with writing and doodles on them. The argument as presented is a bit vague and wishy-washy in comparison with the effort that's obviously been put into presenting the site. We and others (thanks, Alex) were a little, well, suspicious.

We can't agree more with what appears to be the main tenet of the site - that relying on one source of information is not a healthy thing. Bless 'em, those shy and retiring types behind the site are rather reluctant to name the search engine they appear to be having a pop at.

A quick whois.net search brings up the name of the domain registrant as Profero Ltd, a marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO) company, whose clients include Yahoo! and Ask.com. Both of these firms offer search engines that are quite distant rivals Google. Profero is based in trendy Camden, just off Pratt Street. We tried calling them this morning, but they've not got back yet.

Of course, there is choice on the internet when it comes to search, and Yahoo (with 23.8 per cent of the search engine market according to Nielsen/Netratings and Search Engine Watch) and Ask (2.6 per cent) are also valid choices. It's just that Google (49.2 per cent) is awfully good at finding out what people are searching for. Which all goes to show that we should all, indeed, ask serious questions about who is managing the information placed in front of us.

The new opium of the masses

The New York Times profiled Metaweb Technologies and its Freebase project last weekend. Metaweb  spun out from a project at Applied Minds, Inc, and intends to produce a public, machine-readable database as an alternative to search engines.

The idea behind it harks back to that much - quoted 1945 article, As we may think, by Vannevar Bush. Amongst Bush's many observations was that there was an awful lot of information out there, but that keeping up with it - even in a specialised area - was nearly impossible.

The idea behind Freebase, according to the Times, is to hand over a lot of the onerous tasks of searching the Web as an individual to software agents. Instead of bringing back thousands of results, Freebase will bring back a handful - and they will be what you're looking for. The idea is based on co-founder Danny Hillis' Aristotle concept.

This may sound quite familiar, but the idea appears to be to take a lot of the things that are good about the semantic web and stick them in one ginormous database, cutting the amount of time stuck in front of a search engine refining searches. The database can then be searched by software agents and made freely accessible - it's licensed under the Creative Commons copyright license.

At present, Wikipedia, Chefmoz and Musicbrainz - all semantic web organisations - are contributing data, and Hillis suggests in the article that Encyclopedia Britannica may be contributing, too. It'll be a positive sign if EB does.

It's also worth taking a look at Danny Hillis' impressive track record, which includes The Long Now Foundation and the Thinking Machines Corporation, which built massively parallel computers with the involvement of Richard Feynman before going bust.

Library software market faces more turmoil

I've just been putting together next month's sector update for IWR on the library automation and information management market. This is printed to coincide with the Library + information show at the Birmingham NEC next month.

This will be my last sector update for IWR, as I move on to pastures new at the end of the month, but it seems like quite an appropriate place to write a final market round-up.

The library software sector has been traumatised by the impact of the internet, and continuing to make itself relevant to customers has meant only the strong – the companies that could afford to invest heavily in R&D for long-term benefit – have been able to survive.

No wonder then that Reed Elsevier sold Endeavour to Ex Libris last year, or that OCLC Pica snapped up Fretwell-Downing, or Sirsi and Dynix merged into SirsiDynix.

Paul Miller, technology evangelist at Talis, says its still early days to see how customers respond to all this vendor turmoil. "It will be intriguing to see how much further this goes in 2007," he told me. "It remains to be seen exactly how customers will respond to forced migrations from one product to another, and to the consequent reduction in market choice."

Robin Murray, Director of Strategy and Marketing at OCLC Pica, thinks the big changes on the supplier side will continue for some time and have some profound effects on the market.

"If you look at the companies out there you see a lot of first-and second-generation organisations - either owner-managed or with initial venture capital backing. In the IT industry economies of scale are very significant so everyone is looking for growth, but there isn't much organic growth in this market. So the current market conditions and ownership structures are driving a spate of acquisitions and mergers."

With both Microsoft and Google engaged in book digitisation projects on an industrial scale, libraries will need to reinvent themselves quickly for the 21st century – and I think that global-facing libraries with unique, specialist collections who create internet infrastructure that caters to the specialist needs of their users will be the ones that win the day.

Several vendors seem to be going down that route, developing the platforms that will enable this.

NewsGator embeds RSSBus for better feeds

NewsGator Technologies is to deliver /n software's RSSBus Feed Server as part of its Enterprise Server (NGES). This gives organisations the ability to create RSS feeds from all manner of information sources: Oracle, Microsoft and MySQL databases, Microsoft Excel, custom business applications, and so on. It gives users continuous access to information that is important to them.

Think of it as Yahoo! Pipes on steroids because the idea is that you can create flows of information through connectors and operators to arrive at outputs which can be picked up through the web, portals, e-mail clients, desktop applications and mobile devices. A major difference between it and Pipes is that RSSBus runs behind your firewall, although the company does have plans to offer a hosted service.

No doubt NewsGator went to /n software because of the company's deep experience in the manipulation and transformation of data feeds. But, if you don't have NGES, don't worry, you can buy the RSSBus application from /n software and run it on your own server. At the moment, it's designed for Microsoft IIS and requires the Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework. Linux and Java versions are in the pipeline. You can even download a free trial version and run it on your desktop.

Data is fed into the bus as items, converted if necessary into RSS using connectors, and is taken out as RSS feeds. The software is supplied with a bundle of useful connectors, taking care of common format translations. You, or your techie pals, can create new connectors to suit any special local needs.

Finally, feed templates can be used to shape the resulting feed for the receiving device or application.

Whether you get RSSBus as part of NGES or directly, it looks like a smart and secure way of sharing key information within your organisation and among its stakeholders.

Elsevier agree Open Access terms with Howard Hughes Medical Institute

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, founded by the famous aviator, engineer, industrialist and film producer, have agreed with Elsevier to make author manuscripts of articles published in Elsevier and its Cell Press journals freely available within six months of publication if the research was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

Open Access commentator Peter Suber has today described HHMI as the Wellcome Trust of the US and greets the deal, but with reservations.

"This agreement speaks to our shared commitment to making research results freely available to the public and the international scientific community, as well as the significance of Cell Press and Elsevier journals to the communication of research discoveries," said Thomas R. Cech, president of HHMI in a statement.

Elsevier will deposit author manuscripts of the original article as well as supplementary data with PubMed Central and HHMI will pick up the tab for this service. Scientists will not be charged for their articles in the typical Open Access sense, instead HHMI will pay Elsevier quarterly instalments based on the number of articles published. Suber describes this as building on the Elsevier hybrid journal program.

HHMI is about to adopt a new policy that will require scientists it funds to publish their original research in journals that allow their content to be freely accessible through PubMed Central within six months of publication.

What concerns Suber most is that Elsevier retain copyright of the article and do not have to make the final article that has received peer review freely available.

AAP told Google is 'cavalier' with copyright by Microsoft

Tom Rubin, associate general counsel for Microsoft is to tell the Association of American Publishers, which counts Elsevier and John Wiley & Sons as members, that Google is "cavalier" in its approach to copyright. Rubin has also shared his speech contents and thoughts with the Financial Times newspaper.

Rubin will tell his audience that Google is "exploiting" books, films, music and television programmes without copyright owners permission. "Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the back of other people's content are raking in billions through advertising and IPOs," he will say to the New York audience.

Read the full FT story here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/3109938c-cb61-11db-b436-000b5df10621.html

Highlighting the controversial library digitisation project which includes Oxford's Bodleian, Rubin says the project "systematically violates copyright, deprives authors and publishers of an important avenue for monetising their works and, in doing so, undermines incentives to create," the FT reports. The newspaper also reports that Google is breaching copyright law because, "it has bestowed upon itself the unilateral right to make entire copies of copyrighted books."

Microsoft leads the IT assault on info management

The big – and not so big - names in the IT industry are on the march – and they're heading for the information management, knowledge management and content management sectors. In corporates and other large organisations, these disciplines were once the preserve of dedicated teams who developed systems apart from the IT department; now IT managers are being asked to get to grips with the skills involved in dictating company-wide policies on archiving, access, and compliance.

For example, Symantec – a company that made its name with virus protection and security products for PCs and networks – has just released Symantec Information Foundation 2007, a product suite that will "protect against the loss of sensitive proprietary or regulated content by real-time filtering of messages."

SIF 2007 provides a common framework for enforcing content control policies across an enterprise, from email gateway security to archiving. The suite is tightly tied in with Exchange server, and many of the new breed of information management solutions are coming out of companies who are business associates of Microsoft. After all, to be cost effective, information management must take account of, and build on, the infrastructure that already exists.

Microsoft's Sharepoint portal server is increasingly at the heart of specific vertical solutions, because it has a range of tools that make access privileges and content distribution easy to manage. Legal firms in the US, for instance, have been evaluating SV Technology's LawPort for SharePoint product, which offers an information management suite, incorporating intranet, portals and internet, that's designed for big legal firms.

These are precisely the companies, with vast numbers of partners spread over widely-distributed networks, that need robust information solutions with 100% security.

A second generation of solutions is emerging, and if these can be built on technologies that come from two or three reputable, reliable suppliers – IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, say – then ultimately the cost of operation will be slashed as training for those who operate and manage the systems is more widely disseminated.

Swets launch all in one subscription management

Subscription management specialists Swets has launched two integrated versions of its SwetsWise product. SwetsWise now comes in two editions, one for end users and another for its traditional library user base, named Corporate Edition and Library Edition respectively.

Both systems mean users have a single interface for managing all aspects of subscription management. SwetsWise Subscriptions Library Edition replaces Dataswets Connect and manages both electronic and print subscriptions, provides downloadable online reports and status reports on e-licenses will be available soon.

Arje Jongejan, Swets ceo described the new service as making the process of "subscription management easier for customers" and that they would "provide simplicity of a single solution for searching, accessing, managing and evaluating," subscriptions.

All Swets customers will be migrated over  the next year on to the new service.

Dealing with Info-stress and Attention Fatigue

Does this strike a chord?:

"The flow of messages and content faced by information workers is increasing but their attention spans remain fixed and limited."

That comes from an introduction to a report by the Burton Group's Craig Roth catchily (sorry!) entitled 'Techniques to Address Attention Fatigue and Info-Stress in the Too-Much-Information Age'.

Sadly, you have to be a Burton Group client to get hold of the full report, but here's a tip: type "Enterprise Attention Management" into Roth's blog.

Information overload has been a serious issue for a long time. Humans are human and, on our own, we simply cannot significantly improve our thinking speed and work capacity. This leads to a sense of defeat, maybe despair, certainly inadequacy as we become overwhelmed by our inability to deal with the volume and, sometimes, the interruptive nature of incoming information. Without help and guidance, we whirl from one information feed to another: email; instant messaging; wikis; blogs; telephone; ... Weren't these things invented to make us more effective? Often, they can get in the way of our 'real' work and the result is that everything receives less attention than it deserves.

Full marks to Roth for getting the subject out in the open and starting a debate. He calls the phenomenon "attention fatigue" and advocates an "Enterprise Attention Management" (EAM) strategy to deal with it.

Unlike many acronyms that pour out of the IT world, this one could catch on. It is optimistic and provides a focal point for those trying to tackle the problem. In Roth's words, EAM offers "a method for improving the effectiveness of an enterprise's information workers by providing culture, processes, and tools to gain control over the messages sent, received, and discovered by its information workers."

Wiley puts new blood into Hematology journal

A major re-launch of the American Journal of Hematology has been carried out by its publisher John Wiley & Sons, the first in 30 years. The re-vamp is an effort to introduce the journal to a wider audience in the scientific and medical fields and includes a new editor in chief, new graphically led look and a wider editorial focus. 

Dr Carlo Brugnara was selected to be the new editor in chief by a specialised search committee. He adds the editorship  to being the Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and the Director of Hematology Laboratory at the Children's Hospital, Boston.

The re-launched journal will still focus on clinical research, as well as material for physicians in training and clinicians dealing with blood diseases. With its new look Wiley Dr Brugnara hope the journal will now also appeal to cardiologists, neurologists, anesthesiologists and primary care physicians.

New services to be offered by the journal include an open access archive to selected parts of the backfile and a more rapid submissions process for articles.

The March issue kicks off the new look and Wiley hopes the journal will have a wider international appeal now.

www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/ajh